Electronic Book Review - parodyhttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/parody
enHow to Fail (at) Fiction and Influence Everybody: A Review of Penthouse-F by Richard Kalichhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/moist
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Christopher Leise</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2011-10-17</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Richard Kalich is a failed novelist.</p>
<p>At least it is the case that Richard Kalich, the protagonist of the recent novel <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span>, is a failed novelist. This fictional Kalich cannot compose his protean ideas on what he feels could be “the definitive novel of our time”(18) - ideas about the decline of language in the face of an increasingly image-dominated world, and which was to be titled <span class="booktitle">Transfiguration of the Commonplace</span> - into an actual, readable text. Over the course of twenty-five years, his once-prescient projections become banal realities, and the once-profound insights of <span class="booktitle">Transfiguration</span> simply become commonplace observations blithely reported in newspapers and television commentary.</p>
<p>In response to his writerly inability, the imaginary Kalich attempts to will his failed fiction into actuality, inviting a boy and girl that resemble his ideal characters into his beloved penthouse. He develops a mediated relationship with his characters-cum-cohabitants, watching them on closed-circuit cameras, almost as if trying to keep up with a world in which relationships are increasingly mediated by technologies of surveillance and surrogacy. But even those efforts fail, as the boy and girl commit conjoined suicide, opting out of Kalich’s penned-up penthouse by leaping to their deaths.</p>
<p>The sense of an artist’s frustration to fail in staying ahead of his time recalls William Gaddis’s posthumously published <span class="booktitle">Agapē Agape</span>, wailing that Thomas Bernhard had “plagiarized my work right here before I’ve even written it!” (Gaddis 13). And although Kalich’s style is markedly minimalist in contrast to Gaddis’s rant-infused maximalism, both books are similarly fragmentary in their presentation of the writing process. But whereas Gaddis’s final work is an admission of the inevitability of the decline of process into pure chaos (although the underlying ideas remain coherent), the fictional Kalich of <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span> continually longs for control he cannot attain, in both his process and the product it yields.</p>
<p>The facts of <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span> are revealed in a series of shards of a broken whole: many of which take the form of an interrogation led by an unidentified - or should I say unauthorized? - inquisitor; interrogations of Kalich’s neighbors; lists of rules; self-analysis on his mother-son relationship; typescript pages of the unwritten novel, scribbled over with illegible marginalia; and musings on the failure of <span class="booktitle">Transfiguration of the Commonplace</span> to transfigure itself from idea to iteration.</p>
<p>It is, in a way, a mystery: is Kalich responsible for the death of the young lovers? But the mystery is also ontological, as it is generally unclear if the boy and girl truly “exist,” even within the story-world of <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span>. It is unclear if the inquisitor exists outside the character Kalich’s own head, or if the worried writer simply invents a mechanism through which to work out the fact that he “murdered” his characters by failing to write them into something that is “not merely another would-be novel [he] was planning to write” (37).</p>
<p>In a word, <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span> is absurd. But it’s a new take the European absurdist tradition it so lovingly lifts from, yoking to it an Auster-esque indeterminate self-reflexivity.</p>
<p>And so it can also be said: Richard Kalich is a successful novelist.</p>
<p>This is determinately verifiable given the very existence of <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span> as a novel. As a well-received author of three prior novels, the successful writer Kalich has added another installment to a career that is as distinguished as it is consistent.</p>
<p>Then again, perhaps one should reconsider the matter: is Richard Kalich a failed novelist in the specific case of <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span>’s artistic effect, or a successful one? This determination cannot be subjected to the normal praxis of empiricism, because understanding <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span> requires one to ask questions of categorization and of tone. As Warren Motte has already remarked in his review of this book, the novel-as-inquisition is “a topos so broadly exploited in contemporary literature, from Kafka to Volodine, that it is now ripe for parody” (62). Parody, however - like other categories and like tone - cannot inhere in a novel. These elements reside in the space between text and reader, between the codes given by a text and the choices readers make in interpreting those codes. At times, the writing of <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span> signals a kind of literary seriousness, in prose that attains to the tradition the book so clearly cherishes. Describing an act of warmth and contact with his captives (a foot massage), Kalich muses, “An even greater sense of power and erotic command enveloped me as I observed the girl’s imploring, pleading eyes begging that I do the same for the boy, asking nothing for himself, but rather only for the girl” (178).</p>
<p>Yet the text undermines itself farther down the page through repeated and clichéd language and arguably purple prose:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Two images kept recurring in my mind. The boy’s stoical refusal of myself and the girl’s imploring, pleading eyes that had her lover’s welfare more selflessly in mind than her own. At such moments in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat that made my skin stick to the sheets … I kept hearing for the second time in my life a little voice emanating from deep inside me saying: Who’s going to love me? Who’s going to love me? Along with the added proviso - like Romeo and Juliet love each other? (178)</p>
<p>If this is read as un-ironic, serious, literary fiction, we could reasonably conclude that Richard Kalich is a failed novelist. Because, at least from my perspective, the repetition and melodramatic elements are really funny, despite the possibility that it is a sincere effort at expressing exasperation. At the same time, read as parody, it is also really funny … for precisely the same reasons. Taken alongside the fact that the story is so improbable, the protagonist so seemingly impossible (does he have a job?), the character of the inquisitor’s questions often so impertinent to the matter of the suicides, <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span> begs the question: does it matter if we’re laughing with or laughing at?</p>
<p>So allow me to offer another statement, the truth-value of which is questionable but is nevertheless an expression I stand behind: Richard Kalich is a successful novelist, one who has succeeded in consistently producing perplexing fictions that fail to categorize themselves and escape the warping influence of authorial intent. For by so emphatically inserting himself into the fiction of <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span>, questions about the real Kalich’s intentions are thrust far into the realm of the inscrutable. Kalich’s newest novel is either risible for being a weak inheritor of Kafka or it is hilarious for being the most piquant appropriator of absurdism, given your stance as a reader and the choices you make in receiving its tone. I think it is overwhelmingly the latter, and a joy for that.</p>
<p>Thus there is no denying that the work of <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span> is important. It is important because it makes plain the choices by which we approach fiction. And this is something that Kalich’s metafiction does distinctly well. It holds up authorial intent to the effect of effacing it. It questions where literary categories originate from in the first place: writers? texts? publishers? readers? It foregrounds tone by deadening tone so subtly as to leave one unsure how seriously we should take the book’s argument about what Baudrillard called “The Precession of the Simulacra,” now so thoroughly axiomatic as to make a rear-guard observation into an avant-garde artifact.</p>
<p>So in the end, forget about the Richard Kalich the living man, and whether he is successful or not. He probably doesn’t want you thinking about him anyway. But read <span class="booktitle">Penthouse-F</span>, because this is a book that will throw you back into an energetic relationship with the process of reading fiction, and force you to ask as many questions about how you read as it asks questions of itself, its characters, its reality, and ours. And you’ll probably laugh despite the severity of the novel’s inquisition.</p>
<h3>Works Cited</h3>
<p>Gaddis, William. <span class="booktitle">Agapē Agape</span>. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.</p>
<p>Motte, Warren. “Book Review of Richard Kalich’s novel: Penthouse-F.” <span class="booktitle">World Literature Today</span> 85:2 (March-April 2011): 61-62. Print.</p>
<p>Christopher Leise is assistant professor of English at Whitman College. He is most recently the co-editor of <span class="booktitle">Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide</span> (U Delaware P, 2011) and <span class="booktitle">William Gaddis, “The Last of Something”: Critical Essays</span> (McFarland, 2010).</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/avant-garde-0">avant-garde</a>, <a href="/tags/panoptic">panoptic</a>, <a href="/tags/kalich">Kalich</a>, <a href="/tags/parody">parody</a>, <a href="/tags/technology">technology</a>, <a href="/tags/observation">observation</a>, <a href="/tags/writing">writing</a>, <a href="/tags/author">author</a>, <a href="/tags/minimalist">minimalist</a>, <a href="/tags/fragmentary">fragmentary</a>, <a href="/tags/self-referential">self-referential</a>, <a href="/tags/self-reflexive">self-reflexive</a>, <a href="/tags/reflexive">reflexive</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodern">postmodern</a>, <a href="/tags/freud">freud</a>, <a href="/tags/freudian">Freudian</a>, <a href="/tags/psychoanalysis">psychoanalysis</a>, <a href="/tags/voyeur">voyeur</a>, <a href="/tags/ontology">ontology</a>, <a href="/tags/ontological">ontological</a>, <a href="/tags/absurd">absurd</a>, <a href="/tags/absurdist">absurdist</a>, <a href="/tags/kafka">kafka</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1381 at http://electronicbookreview.comsokal text: another funny thing happened on the way to the forumhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/polylogical
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Joe Amato</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-09-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>why the hell is there a national controversy over at <span class="journaltitle">social text</span>?… how might it have been defused, if not avoided?… in what follows, i’d like to work through some of the ins and outs of this ongoing debate, in the process advocating a more fully dialogic use of electronic fora… for those who missed the <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> brouhaha as it unfolded: a physicist, one alan sokal, publishes a piece entitled “transgressing the boundaries: toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity,” in the spring/summer 1996 special issue of the magazine <span class="journaltitle">social text</span>, an issue devoted to the so-called “science wars”… now, in most academic circles, <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> enjoys a fairly esteemed rep., published as it is by duke u p under the co-editorial leadership of none other than andrew ross and bruce robbins… anyway, subsequent to publication, sokal writes in the may/june issue of <span class="journaltitle">lingua franca</span> that he has published his piece in order to answer the following (loaded) question: “would a leading journal of cultural studies publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?”… sokal, a self-professed “leftist,” has evidently been incited to his prank after confirming on his own the legitimacy of claims made by paul gross and norman levitt in their 1994 book, <span class="booktitle">higher superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science</span> - a book that presumes to take on the evils of postmodernism, cultural studies, and the like…</p>
<p>after sokal’s revelation, ross himself composes a rather detailed electronic defense of the editorial policies leading to the publication of sokal’s piece (ross’s defense makes its way to poetics via list member steven shoemaker’s decision to forward same, steve’s tag line quoting courtney love’s “i fake it so real i am beyond fake”)… which details are later denied in at least one substantive way by sokal (in a rejoinder sokal distributed electronically after the <span class="journaltitle">ny times</span> apparently refused to print it because of its length): ross claims that sokal was “resistant” to any “general revisions” of the sort <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> recommended, while sokal claims that he asked repeatedly for “substantive comments, suggestions and criticisms,” but never received any (thanks to aldon lynn nielsen for pointing this out - on poetics)… anyway, here’s the core of ross’s response:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">in sum, sokal’s assumption that his “parody” struck a disreputable chord with the woozy editors of social text is ill-conceived. indeed, its status as parody does not alter substantially our initial perception of, and our interest in, the piece itself as a curio, or symptomatic document. of course, the whole affair may say something about our own conception of how physicists read philosophy, but that seems less important to us than that his prank does not simply lead to a heightening of the hysteria which the science wars have induced.</p>
<p>ross’s response is followed by a longish op-ed piece in the 21 may <span class="journaltitle">ny times</span>, “professor sokal’s bad joke,” by none other than stanley fish, head honcho of duke u p and a professor of english and law at duke… in his piece, fish claims that sokal is culpable on the count of “two misunderstandings”: first, that sokal “takes ‘socially constructed’ to mean ‘not real’ ”; and second, having not properly understood those sociologists who advocate science-as-socially-constructed-practice, sokal “thinks that the sociology of science is in competition with mainstream science” (fish elucidates all of this via the analogy of baseball, a lý stephen jay gould - an antic that, in this case, only muddies matters further)… hence fish concludes that sokal, because of his inadequate understanding of sociology as a “research project,” has managed a “deception” that “threatens to undermine the intellectual standards he vows to protect”…</p>
<p>well, let’s see if i understand fish correctly: sokal has not correctly grasped sociology of science, ergo he has through his paper unwittingly undermined professional-intellectual standards… but here fish is culpable on the count of two misrepresentations: first, sociologists of science themselves continue to have profound disagreements over the status of social constructivism, known in shorthand as socon… for example, warren schmaus, ullica segerstrale and douglas jesseph, in the journal <span class="journaltitle">social epistemology</span> (“a manifesto”; 1992, vol. 6, no. 3) refute what they (with tongues-in-cheek) refer to as “the soft program” of socon, which includes socon in the “strong sense,” on the grounds that, in this latter, “the cognitive commitments of scientists are either denied or treated as irrelevant” (243; and i’m not taking sides here)… so sokal is at least not wrong in having presumed residual (if somewhat mitigated) controversies over socon-based research… fish’s second misrepresentation has to do with the status of sokal’s “hoax” itself: fish suggests fraud and impropriety on sokal’s part, even as he attributes a certain ignorance of epistemology to sokal’s paper… but if sokal has *incorrectly* grasped a field of inquiry, how could his “hoax” possibly produce fish’s “corrosive effects”?… fish himself argues that sociology of science poses no “threat” to science, that the “integrity” of a research enterprise will not come from “presumptuous outsiders” but from “insiders who decide not to play by the rules or to put the rules in the service of a devious purpose”… yet sokal is *not* an insider - he’s clearly an outsider… what’s missing here is any substantive discussion of *why* the formal maneuvers sokal deployed in his “parody” made it past the <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> editorial board… if the research conventions of a given field of inquiry are so transparent as to permit such deception to take place, then at the very least we need to take a long hard [wink] look at those conventions…</p>
<p>now before any of my readers get the wrong idea about me or my position on such matters, let me cut and paste from a few of my initial posts to poetics:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">i think mebbe ross oughtta just cop to it, and admit that sokal’s prank got past the editorial board…</p>
<p class="longQuotation">nevertheless, i find mself on the ross side of things in terms of challenging sokal’s “leftist” motives, and in terms of what sort of work i find valuable, even as, again, i do think that sokal managed to put one over on <span class="journaltitle">social text</span>, all naysaying to the contrary…</p>
<p class="longQuotation">why is it that this controversy, at least as it’s coming down the pike, is taking place over there, in print?… at least among the contenders, i mean - ross, fish, sokal, etc?… why the hell don’t we have an electronic forum where sokal, ross, fish and anybody else who’s interested can converge to chew over these… discrepancies?…</p>
<p class="longQuotation">a lot of the hogwash that’s likely to emerge from this controversy could probably be addressed and dispensed with in just a few email exchanges… which, of course, is hardly to argue for progress, but which is to make a claim for process, due and otherwise…</p>
<p class="longQuotation">so those who choose to explore the interconnections among (?) these domains are bound to find themselves in mixed company, so to speak… it’s fraught terrain, punctuated by territorial struggles and anxieties… and practical jokes (like sokal’s) aside, there’s a certain need, as i see it, to try to speak in ways that promote dialogue, not division…</p>
<p class="longQuotation">still, i’m ultimately on ross’s side on this, if i’ve gotta choose sides, i mean… i don’t think he’s been disingenuous, i think rather he’s merely saturated with his subject position, and is seeping here and there…</p>
<p>ysee, on poetics i have the benefit of a number of other thinkers and writers (400 or so subscribers at the moment) to help me hone my own thinking, as well as to kick around these issues w/o any of us necessarily digging in… here are some particularly trenchant observations by rob wilson, advisory editor at <span class="journaltitle">boundary2</span> (another duke journal):</p>
<p class="longQuotation">shaking the foundations of professional expertise at and around s[ocial]t[ext], sokal is now accused of having written a sophomoric ‘fraud’ and having violated the very professional ethics and professional decorums that sustain such expertise knowledge communities (stanley fish, predictably, in his op-ed take-out so-called sokal piece); but what the nyu professor of physics has actually written is not so much ‘fraud’ as a parodic miming of the pomo cult codes (some of his footnotes are pretty hilarious) and a sending up of an over-extended ‘culturalism’ colonizing domains of reality/history/material production and reproduction where it may just fall apart or become wishy-washy and inadequate.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">that st editors ex post facto can now claim (via a[ndrew] r[oss] on www) that they knew all along it was a ‘sophomoric’ piece of cultural studies by a naive scientist; that st is never ‘refereed’ (what is the in-house critical collective but a set of primary discrimination makers of the in/out, enacting [sure, informally] the rules for what passes as any “social text” text?); and that the sokal essay was going to be dropped from the expanded book edition at duke u p (this would be an unusual post facto decision to make, as duke u p usally runs all the essays and whatever else the editors choose to add from its journals’ “special issues,” within space limits of course), sounds like more critical two-step shuffle to me: why not admit to having been deceived and work from the insights and struggles of that moment? sure, it’s a postmodern black hole now: that a pro-sandinista physicist can be embraced as an ally by rush limbaugh on right-wing talk radio and be stimulated by the “higher superstition” faction of anti-pc-construction science to write such a piece just plays into the spectacle of media reductions - some at b[oundary]2 have suggested this will only drive up the subscription lists of st and generate more cultural capital and “science war” discourse for the players (if they don’t fall or leap from nyu windows and fall upward, “deconstructing postmodern gravity, slyly”) and the press.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">but sokal has, I think, caught ross and the st “star wars” discourse apparatus in an over-extension of their ‘culturalism,’ miming the codes in devious simulacrous ways that reflect and refract where the journal is philosophically at. as somebody has said, under such pressure, the “subject position” is oozing into “position(s).”</p>
<p>more might be added here about ross’s gloss on the institutional site of his journal - “social text has always seen its lineage in the ‘little review’ tradition of the independent left as much as in the academic domain”… but when all is said and done, after having read many if not all of the related documents, it’s evident to me that this latter controversy, fraught as it appears to be with ulterior motives, might have been attended to in a public forum that does not itself feed, directly, the mainstream news tendency to ostracize intellectual-eggheads (that’s me too), to capitalize on the anti-intellectual leanings of mainstream public life in the u.s… and that this might itself have mitigated, if not avoided, a public dispute that exacerbates the academic in-fighting scene and magnifies, in the mainstream public eye, the irrelevance of (for one) humanities scholarship… which in turn feeds the current corporate-vocationalizing pressures on academe, however indirectly (and on my tech. campus, it’s not all that indirect)…</p>
<p>and OK: i’d rather that our articulate proponents on the left hadn’t left behind me and a host of others sympathetic (and unsympathetic) to more liberatory agenda by conducting their disputes in more mainstream print fora, fora that few of us have access to…</p>
<p>my reading of the sokal text debacle - as i posted to the poetics list in response to rob wilson’s fine insights - was that all parties had been insufficiently *literary*, finally… that the <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> editorial board might have seen sokal’s parody for what it was, not simply as a “curio” (ross)… that sokal might not have mistaken his intentions, or the resulting generic form said intentions took (parody, or satire - and there is a difference), as a somehow intrinsically-discounted contribution to knowledge-as-we-know-it (the piece may in fact have some residual, say, metaphorical value, however much bullshit is “in” it - but i won’t belabor this latter point here)… and that this itself suggests that we attend to our discourses, to our writing and reading practices, with a better understanding of the various writing and reading publics ‘out there’… not that attending to the literary as such gets us “out” of our various institutional predicaments, as rob himself was quick to point out - online…</p>
<p>though i’ve never been entirely happy with mcluhan’s distinction between hot (user-passive) and cold (user-interactive) media, he *did* happen to mention, in his characteristically sage way, that one “vantage point from which to test the difference between hot and cold media is the practical joke”… and this may be just the point at which my invocation of the “literary” falters (that is, unless i modify it some): so many critics and theorists of culture and literature just may not get it, they may not quite see their own investment in the literary values of a bygone era, much as interrogations of canonicity can often obscure same old same old exercises in discursive preciosity - talking the same old ways to the same old crowds… for mcluhan, the “hot literary medium excludes the practical and participant aspect of the joke” (<span class="booktitle">understanding media</span> 32)… mcluhan isn’t saying that such jokes don’t exist, but simply that literary-inclined folks generally find them “distasteful”… but by “literary” mcluhan means immersion in print literacy, typography and the like…</p>
<p>one nice thing about the emergence of electronic media, for those so-inclined, is that such media tend to render the forms, contents and motivations of print practice much less transparent, thereby auguring a more informed and inclusive understanding of the literary as a varying site of literacy… perhaps this development itself might encourage a certain sense of disciplinary humor, a capacity for not taking one’s professional Self too seriously, however serious or passionate one may be about one’s work… but we’ll have to tune our wits in, too, to the very real possibility of online news forgeries and the like… after experiencing numerous rounds of virus gags (the perennial “good times” virus comes immediately to mind), i think myself more savvy, and less vulnerable, to pranks and tomfoolery… but who am i kidding? - i’m just a bit more aware of how easy it is to be fooled when one’s critical/creative faculties are stuck in the holding pattern of publication (*this* holding pattern)…</p>
<p>this is not exactly what you’d call news, and andrew ross, for one, knows it… he’s written insightfully on “technoculture,” on popular culture and media, on poetry and poetics… but perhaps writing “on” or “about” such stuff prevents him from fully recognizing the distance, and leverage, such prepositions effect… in any case, i wouldn’t want to find myself in the ungainly position of advocating only more performative media forms, esp. not these days… it’s just that we need an enhanced awareness of a wider range of practices…</p>
<p>so, as to publishing policies: it’s not a matter of winnowing submissions more methodically… it’s more a matter of understanding the broad range of possibilities available for sustained discussion and exchange… from a teaching point of view (and i am a teacher), it’s imperative that educational systems teach critical reading, writing and thinking less as a function of skills acquisition and more as a matter of helping students to engage with the incredible variety of reading and writing communities present in this country and around the globe (and when i write “reading and writing,” i mean to refer to symbolic practices in general)… and again, though online technologies represent the techno-triumph of advanced industrialization and should always be viewed with critical prophylaxis in place, they can be helpful here… writing and reading communities often correspond to formally substantive textual orientations, but such communities don’t begin and end there… an identifiable cadre of poets, for example, may be enamored of a diverse range of aesthetic techniques; on the other hand, there are specific aesthetics that at times induce specific artistic groupings… the point is to increase as well as expand upon current conceptions of literacy, to recognize a much wider array of aesthetic possibilities, discursive possibilities, *social* possibilities than are generally given press in the various press outlets… for example, i mentioned online that -</p>
<p>there is a journal - as i recall the title, <span class="journaltitle">the journal of irreproducible results</span> - that provides a forum for mock-scientific studies of mock phenomena, playing specifically off of *scientific* jargon and methodology, and playing specifically to scientists and the scientifically-inclined… i mention this by way of indicating that sokal’s parody has precedent within scientific discourse communities… if what sokal did is, as ross calls it, a “boy stunt,” it is also connected with the general ethos of scientific discourse, if only on this latter’s (lunatic?) fringes… an ethos emerging from a long history of proving, disproving, and, on occasion, offering up false proofs as a challenge, or for a few laughs - whatever the residual positivism or, as some would have it, male-adolescent leanings…</p>
<p>so what i have to say goes for academia and academics as well… antagonisms of left and right (and shall i declare, like the rest, my leftist leanings?) are not about to go away, nor am i suggesting, again, that online spaces will necessarily allay tensions owing to same… i for one intend to remain adamantly opposed to specific conservative agenda, regardless the medium… but -</p>
<p>let’s take the <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> effort specifically: rather than “focus” an “issue” on a “piece” (albeit originally a talk given) by michael bÈrubÈ (or anybody else), why not set up, instead, an interview forum whereby the <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> editorial staff holds a one week long list-exchange between michael and any number of invited participants?… in fact this could be a wholly open affair - it’s not necessarily the case that a cast of thousands will show up to participate, and in any case the list itself may be moderated… the forum could begin by focusing on a specific topic, and be permitted to digress from there, as list exchange generally does… most readers will note that this is hardly something new - irc’s, moo’s and the like have been providing synchronous gathering places for years now… the only kinda new thang (at this point) is the rather fuzzy publication aura of this process… can we academics put this sorta thing on our vitae?…</p>
<p>well, why not?… if you think you need to do so, why then do so…</p>
<p>in any case, the result would be an archive-able log of give and take over a set duration… this log might be edited into a summary of various cogent posts… or it might simply be archived as such and presented as “THIS MONTH’S FORUM” (of course, this has precedent in print media)… readers of <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> might be encouraged to post commentary in response to the forum to <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span>, as well as (and this is crucial) to the various participants themselves… all participants should be required to post their email addresses, a stipulation that should ensure online access to all participants from all participants, as well as discourage any participant from treating the list forum as a monologic publication zone (of course there are no guarantees this won’t happen)…</p>
<p>and with a bit more generosity, and a more informed understanding of - or at least concession to - their own place as a print journal in the diverse range of print and electronic fora, the <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> folks might have proceeded similarly (to put the burden on the publisher, that is, and not sokal)… and invited sokal, ross, fish, robbins et. al. to participate in precisely such a forum… which latter might have been edited for a subsequent issue of the journal… which result would seem, as well, to satisfy ross’s description of <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> as a non-refereed journal (which assertion raised more than an eyebrow on poetics, incl. my own, because many of us understood the journal to be refereed)… in any case, nothing prevents <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> from opting to accept participation ‘over the transom,’ esp. in an online forum… such online fora may, in fact, be an esp. useful strategy when discourses collide… if only in retrospect, the gradual migration of the <span class="journaltitle">social text</span> debate into these regions - ross’s post, sokal’s rejoinder, my essay - suggests as much…</p>
<p>one liability of online space warrants specific elaboration here: as most electronic lists bear witness to, there are many more men than women presently occupying such spaces (albeit more women are logging-on than ever before), and, to hazard an essentialism of sorts, men - we men, most of us - do in fact bring with us our defensive conversational habits and male-territorial urges… but again: no reason not to take this as further impetus for more renowned folks like ross and bÈrubÈ to use their institutional leverage, incl. their insight into gender issues, to help populate these spaces with more women and more women-friendly conversational structures…</p>
<p>running out of breath and winding down to a provisional end: i find the slippage/seepage in ross’s AND bÈrubÈ’s subject positions problematic to the extent that these latter two gents continue to deny their own investment and complicity in maintaining a “position” predicated on privileged institutional status of one sort or another - that is, a complicity of privilege, and one rooted in print publication practices… for bÈrubÈ and ross, little seems to disrupt their apparent critical sobriety, and they go about their business with business-as-usual cool - two visible, if not powerful, spokespersons for the many on the left… but hey, guess what? - I’M NOT, uhm, COOL, anymore than i’m hooked on phonics, however hot and/or cold the medium… if what we homo sapiens are about is finding ways to engage in more open and candid exchange, with the objective of reducing oppressive, discriminating, normative practices, then we can ill-afford the orthodox stance of speaking only to those who have ears for us… sure, allowance must be made for dissonant articulations (sometimes i’d rather not be understood, really, so much as *felt*) and for complex communities (which latter are likely to persevere underground in any case)… “to publish” means to go public, yes, but one can go public w/o exactly publishing… and as just about anybody who’s spent any time at all in the online world will tell you, it’s not necessary to enter an electronic list and say things for once and for all, as though your professional life depended on it… to be willing to mix it up some, to be willing to listen to grad. students and undergrad. students, academics and non-academics, folks who may not publish all that much but who nonetheless may have a helluva lot to add to the discussion, and whose experience may differ greatly from one’s own - this is the best of the online world… as to the effect online lists can have on print publishing venues, and vice versa - as well as questions pertaining to the serious social and cultural work, even in a more hybrid print-electronic era, encompassed by the qualifier *literary* - these latter are open to anybody’s speculation - anybody, that is, reading along these lines…</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/joe-amato">joe amato</a>, <a href="/tags/andrew-ross">andrew ross</a>, <a href="/tags/alan-sokal">alan sokal</a>, <a href="/tags/electronic-communit">electronic communit</a>, <a href="/tags/stanley-fish">stanley fish</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-berube">michael berube</a>, <a href="/tags/social-construct">social construct</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/science-wars">science wars</a>, <a href="/tags/parody">parody</a>, <a href="/tags/cultural-studies">cultural studies</a>, <a href="/tags/warren-schmaus">warren schmaus</a>, <a href="/tags/ullica-segerstrale">ullica segerstrale</a>, <a href="/tags/douglas-jesseph">douglas jesseph</a>, <a href="/tags/rob-wilson">rob wilson</a>, <a href="/tags/rush-limbaugh">Rush Limbaugh</a>, <a href="/tags/technoculture">technoculture</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator922 at http://electronicbookreview.comMimicrieshttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/parodic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Rone Shavers</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-04-20</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="booktitle">False Positive</span>, the latest book by the prolific and combatively iconoclastic experimental author Harold Jaffe, is preceded by an “Author’s Note,” a caveat that serves as an explanation and explicit statement concerning the pathology of the stories that follow, and the methods used in order to achieve their desired effects. It is worth repeating:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Each text in <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span> was initially a newspaper article which I have “treated.” I enter the article, and by various stratagems expose the text’s predictable but absurd ideology, in the process teasing out its most fertile (that is to say, terrorist) subtexts. Thus rearmed, the prosthetic text is released into Culture to do its dirty work.</p>
<p>Each of <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span> ‘s fifteen short stories was inspired by a newspaper article that Jaffe creatively appropriated and altered, either by almost completely rewriting the article, or by inserting new passages and descriptions in it, thereby opening up an agonistic (à la Homi Bhabha), dialogic (à la Bakhtin) space in the reader’s perception of quotidian informational texts. Thus, the “terrorist” subtext that Jaffe seeks to “tease out” in this collection is intended to effect tri-fold results: challenge the dominant ideology; make the reader aware of his or her interpellation; and force the reader to realize that almost all forms of popular media are used as a means of preserving, re-inscribing, and reifying interpellative power.</p>
<p>But is making a reader aware of his or her subjection enough to somehow change a reader’s relation to a (actually, the) dominant power structure? Jaffe seems to think so, for each story in this collection attempts to passively impart a resistance to Culture by presenting a simultaneous and potentially dialogic version of the article chosen. Therein lies the first problem with <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span>, for the form (and formal aspects of the work) “exposes” little that is truly detrimental to Power’s (or “Culture’s” if you prefer) interpellative acts and ideological claims. Effective dialogic texts often (re)present an alternative to the culture resisted, an alternative view, but because Jaffe has merely made “prosthetic” articles, because he has only cosmetically altered his source-texts, his stories are as effective of inducing Cultural resistance as a Saturday Night Live skit. Faux journalism is still a form of journalism, after all, and therefore the prosthetic stories of <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span> must be read as essentially parodic mimicries and not “terroristic” texts as he asserts, because the counter-narratives (re)presented are actually both stylistically and formally not that different from the source material Jaffe hopes to undermine. For instance, regard the following passage from his story entitled “Carthage, Miss.,” and note that because Jaffe’s counter-narrative appears in italics, I reproduce them below:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">When Crystal Wells died on Nov. 3, her son Travis draped her denim jacket over her body, covered her face and shoulders with newspaper, and laid her, face up, in a corner of the cramped family room of the one-bedroom trailer.</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">When Crystal Wells died on Nov. 3, her son Tyler covered her body with her pale mauve terrycloth bathrobe, placed sheets of toilet paper over her face and shoulders, and set her, face up, in a corner of the cramped family room of the one-bedroom trailer.</span></p>
<p class="longQuotation">Crystal was petite, just five-feet-one in her stocking feet.</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">Crystal was petite, just five-feet-two in her lizard skin line-dancing boots.</span></p>
<p class="longQuotation">After his mom’s death, Travis prepared meals - mainly frozen pizza, Froot Loops and beef jerky - and went to school every day until her body was discovered Monday by family friends Dot and Earl Begley.</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">After his mom’s death, Tyler fixed his own meals - mainly frozen pizza, chocolate energy bars and chunky style peanut butter - and went to school every day until Crystal’s body was discovered Monday by her half-sister and brother-in-law, Dot and Earl Begley</span> (<span class="booktitle">False Positive</span> 33-34).</p>
<p>It is difficult to say exactly what “predictable but absurd ideology” is exposed above, because aside from changing a few details and familial relations, one reads nothing that truly challenges “Culture” in a specific or explicit way. Without the insertion of a counter-ideological position, an alternative view, Jaffe’s attempt to create a supposedly subversive dialogic text reads only like two equally solipsistic monologues. The author is a bit too faithful to the original source material to effect a reader’s psychic break from interpellation; to engender Cultural resistance.</p>
<p>Throughout these pages, Jaffe’s reliance (despite its significance, its primary importance to the work) upon journalistic reportage as the ur-source of all his textual play makes this collection seem like an exercise, an experimentation, like yet another diversion in the long list of language games; like something worthy of perhaps one story, but not an entire collection of them. In a society where even a fourteen year old can define and provide examples of propaganda, and competing news networks can provide wildly uneven coverage of events (for example, compare the discrepancies in coverage of our recent war in Iraq between the far-Right FOX News, the center-Right BBC, and the Left-of-center, in this instance, Al-Jazeera TV; or the oftentimes conflicting details of reports issued by embedded, dis-embedded, and un-embedded journalists), it is too reductive and simplistic to premise one’s fiction on the notion that reportage is far from factual. Almost every American author of the past quarter century with even a miniscule political inclination has in one way or another implied that journalism/reportage is far from the “truth” (and to cite just a few random works from the top of my head, Joan Didion’s <span class="booktitle">Salvador</span>, Percival Everett’s <span class="booktitle">Erasure</span>, and William Gaddis’ <span class="booktitle">Carpenter’s Gothic</span> spring readily to mind); that truth is often determined by what one is willing to identify, acknowledge, and believe; and that truth is as subjective as it is subjected to media “spin.” To devote a book solely to exposing this “absurd ideology” smacks of critical and aesthetic regression, not innovation. Since the Vietnam War, distrust of the media has been a symptomatic condition of intellectual maturity, a prerequisite of both Right- and Left-leaning critical thinking, and thus the simple deconstruction of media(ted) “Culture” in a work of fiction amounts to nothing short of an endeavor that can rightfully be called so Grad School 101; so 1989; intellectual navel (or in this case, newspaper) gazing at its most creative finest.</p>
<p>This is not to say that <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span> is bad collection of stories, rather that it is disappointing. Its anti-hegemonic potential is not realized, for the collection requires that a reader already have knowledge of Jaffe’s particular ideological and theoretical positions. One must know the context in which (and for what purpose) this work has been made in order to truly understand the cultural depth and literary gravitas of the author’s intentions, and the information provided in Jaffe’s one-paragraph Author’s Note is simply not enough.</p>
<p>Heavily influenced by such radical and foundationally disparate thinkers as Guy Debord, Paul Virilio, and E. F. Schumacher, Jaffe attempts through his writing to subvert - although pervert is a more apt description - Western bourgeois capitalism (what he often calls the “technoculture”), and reclaim both art and art-making as something potentially able to inspire action and capable of destabilizing hegemonic forces wherever these forces may be. Yet it is mainly through his non-fiction writing that his desire to reclaim art is made explicit. For example, the following quote is from his non-fiction work entitled, “Slash and Burn: A Narrative Model for the Millennium” (excerpted in <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/bulldozed">ebr</a>) and it reveals volumes more about his authorial intentions than the entire paragraph that precedes his current fictional collection:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">We know that official culture employs its media, both print and electronic, to subsume us with its version of its own narrative. Other versions - counter-narratives - are either not represented, marginalized, or deliberately misrepresented….</p>
<p class="longQuotation">There isn’t, then, a contemporary audience for revolutionary art as such. This doesn’t preclude more limited art - acts of, as it were, beneficent terrorism, which have the potential to spread like bush fires, but at the very least will have some small usefulness in defamiliarizing official ideology. I’m referring to narratives which are parallel to the dominant narrative, but largely invisible, marginal, subjugated….</p>
<p>According to Jaffe, then, the more dominant forces (read, the aesthetics) of “official” Culture have “marginalized” and “subjugated” other, perhaps more subversive (thus less controllable) aesthetic and formal choices in art, and so he presents the stories in <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span> as a counter- (with all that the word implies) -cultural alternative, a “parallel” to the dominant narrative/aesthetic which can be used as a means of “defamiliarizing official ideology.”</p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with such a view - in fact, I wholeheartedly endorse and agree with Jaffe’s condemnation of the aesthetics of “official” culture - but the (or at least my) problem with the idea that a “parallel” text can destabilize ideology is that it assumes that defamiliarization will instantly engender a resistance (and a continuously resurgent resistance at that) to official ideology when that is often not the case. Louis Althusser, in his famous essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” astutely depicts how interpellation into the dominant ideology is a constant process, one that perpetually re-occurs to individual subjects again and again and again. Ideology, according to Althusser, thus begins to function as an individual’s “comfort zone.” Still, if one of the intentions of <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span> is to make its reader aware of exactly how newspaper articles reinforce interpellation, does Jaffe really think that merely making one aware of newspapers’ - and by extension, journalism’s - interpellative properties is enough to forever prevent a reader’s re-interpellation into the (aesthetics and narratives of the) dominant (or “official”) culture? Can a “parallel” counter-narrative, simply because it cleverly mimics the dominant narrative, give rise to a new <span class="foreignWord">Aufklarung</span>? A moment of temporary enlightenment that might lead to a state of permanent enlightenment is what Jaffe seeks to create in his collection, it is the “beneficient terrorism” he hopes to enact. But because of the power of interpellation, the absolute hegemony Culture possesses, rather than the terror of awareness Jaffe hopes for, readers experience naught but a startle, what happens when one experiences a tiny, inconsequential fright that remains forever unregistered by memory.</p>
<p>Jaffe himself seems to be conscious of this intellectual and aesthetic impasse though, for in “Five-Point Restraints: Art Making in the Technosphere,” after intimating that art has lost its significance in our increasingly technological and commodified culture, he posits an alternative purpose for art in Western bourgeois capital culture - a raison d’ecrire, as it were:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The “prescription” which follows is eclectic, combining the modernism of Brecht and Debord’s Situationism with activist components of Conceptual Art and contemporary theory. The object is not to enunciate a new artistic credo but to rearticulate certain art practices which have been unjustly abandoned. What is called for, then, is a Crisis art…. [C]risis art is able to locate the seams in the techno-system in which to plant its counter-ideological mines. These seams are the rents, or fault lines, in the web of interlocking ideology which prevent us from being ourselves.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">How does the “guerrilla” artist lay these counter-ideological mines? She looks for a juncture or seam that is relatively unguarded, or less rigorously policed, she plants the mine and scuttles away….</p>
<p>Judging from the above statement, one may then assume that the stories of <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span> are representative of Jaffe’s “Crisis Art”: a necessary fictional intervention that plants a counter-ideological mine in the mind of its reader while its author “scuttles” quietly away. Yet my point of contention is that Jaffe’s solution to this crisis, his attempts to illustrate critical, cultural resistance when reading a text - and then seduce the reader into doing the same - only works if and when the reader is made aware of the political underpinnings of his quite strategic textual moves, and the stories in this collection (what can rightfully be described as the articulation of his ideology in a fictional form), do not reveal enough about the author’s intentions to carry their desired weight, to produce any sort of ideological effect at all. The stories written here lack true disruptive or counter-ideological force because they are, as he attests in his Author’s Note, merely passively “released into Culture, to do their dirty work.”</p>
<p>By not including his own ideological content in his stories, Jaffe nullifies his own attempt to create, portray, and maintain a counter-ideological connection, if only because he gives the reader neither clear indication of what his counter-ideology entails, nor what benefits he believes his liberatory, counter-ideological position provides. Instead, he leaves the reader to guess at the goal of his directed work, and a reader that is resistant or even just unaware of the subversive intent of its presentations may miss the point entirely. In short, then, <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span> preaches to the already-converted, an idyllic choir of pre-illuminated, “guerilla” artists, because for the uninitiated, for those not privy to Jaffe’s intention to stage a critical intervention, the counter-ideological mine will never detonate in a flash of obvious revelatory shrapnel. Those who get it, will get it; those who don’t (or even more problematically, won’t), are left to wander aimlessly throughout thetext in a self-defeating search for meaning.</p>
<p>Because Jaffe provides no indicative or exemplary way to possibly counter hegemony and instead merely “parallels” (i.e., parodies, mimics) hegemonic texts, he leaves intact the selfsame ideology that his stories are supposed to disrupt, even while tacitly positing that there is indeed a way to counter them - a way that is implied in his exhortation to “find a seam, plant a mine, slip away….” I find such a contradiction to be emblematic of the collection’s essential antilogy, for <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span> is equally as dependant upon the same set of social forces and narratives as the newspaper articles it seeks to eliminate. I say this because as previously stated, <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span> must remain faithful to journalistic tropes in order to create its dialogic, agonistic space, but also because, precisely like the journalism it mocks, it impotently hides its ideology under layer upon layer of just the supposed (and sometimes fictional) “facts.”</p>
<p>This is not to say that all narratives must illustrate a distinct and discernable ideology, or that all fiction should be written with an easily-identifiable ideology in mind, but rather that if one attempts in one’s work to destabilize one ideology and posit another, then one’s work must clearly state and/or represent one’s counter-ideological vision. Jaffe’s project is not new (and to his credit, he does describe it as the re-articulation of “certain art practices”) - the exposure of the absurdity of ideology of the Western narrative, in its literary, historical, contemporary, and colloquial sense - but the project has been more successfully realized before, most recently and notably in the work of Kathy Acker. Acker’s <span class="booktitle">Don Quixote</span>, <span class="booktitle">Empire of the Senseless</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Great Expectations</span> are also examples of “terrorist” texts, texts where a “guerilla” artist writes brazenly “parallel” narratives, but the difference between the work of Acker and Jaffe is that Acker’s work reflects an explicit counter-ideological commitment, a position that is further made self-evident when one reads any one of her texts. Acker actively releases her work into Culture - that is to say, it is impossible to not know Acker’s aesthetic and counter-ideological positions when reading her texts - in contrast to Jaffe, who unnecessarily compartmentalizes his views, articulating his counter-ideology and aesthetic claims only in his non-fiction. To return to one of my earlier claims then, if faux journalism is still a form of journalism, and if Jaffe is right in his assessment that we can read most dominant culture journalism as a form of propaganda, then the failure of Jaffe’s story collection is that it, too, functions as a sort of propaganda, but unfortunately, he does not deign to tell the reader what his particular brand of propaganda supports.</p>
<p>By exposing the dominant ideology of the narratives while simultaneously evacuating them of any mention of his intended counter-ideology, Jaffe has done his text a great disservice. And it is indeed a disservice, because aside from their initial shock value, the stories in <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span>, stories such as “Pizza Parlor” (which describes a wife’s revenge on her child-molester husband), “Nameless Moroccan 12 Stories Up” (which recounts one man convincing the title character to not attempt suicide), “Slurry” (in which the story of Sunny Boy Nuñez is juxtaposed with a brief description of what is necessary to carry out an anthrax attack), and others, fall shy of true provocation, intellectual, cultural, or otherwise, for they do not reveal the underpinnings of Jaffe’s counter- (or anti-) Cultural views. His desire to find a seam and slip away. Jaffe’s effort to destabilize bourgeois hegemony in <span class="booktitle">False Positive</span> is both a laudable and worthwhile act, but he fails in the execution. The author does indeed plant his terroristic, counter-ideological mine (mind) and slip away, but alas, he leaves it in a place where far too few people will ever step.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/jaffe">jaffe</a>, <a href="/tags/shavers">shavers</a>, <a href="/tags/fc2">fc2</a>, <a href="/tags/parody">parody</a>, <a href="/tags/guy-debord">Guy Debord</a>, <a href="/tags/paul-virilio">paul virilio</a>, <a href="/tags/and-e-f-schumacher">and E. F. Schumacher</a>, <a href="/tags/france">france</a>, <a href="/tags/louis-althusser">Louis Althusser</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator857 at http://electronicbookreview.comJane's Soliloquyhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/narralogic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Ronald Sukenick</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2002-08-17</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/endconstruction/nubby">Reforming Creative Writing Pedagogy</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="longQuotation">&gt;–&gt; In Act 3 of “Reforming Creative Writing Pedagogy,” Kass Fleisher considers a scene from Ron Sukenick’s book, Narralogues, in which (writes Fleisher) “…Sukenick’s Waldo meets up with a ‘jeune-fille’ who wins ‘a point in her favor’ when she says she likes Rabelais. Their (clearly competitive) conversation is narrated from Waldo’s point of view, so jeune-fille is subjected to his gaze (we’re not told what this ‘plain and pious looking’ student with a ‘pneumatic fleshiness’ thinks of Old Fart Waldo who judges people by whether they like Rabelais and are fleshy).” Sukenick, in reply, re-narrates the scene from Jane’s point of view:</p>
<h2>Jane’s Soliloquy</h2>
<p>Of course I know what he’s after really. Any older man is just after any young girl’s butt, even if he pretends to like totally dislike her. Really, we all know that. And he’s such an old fart too, like he must be at least twenty-eight, what’s an old jerk like that doing giving me the once over just because I’m wearing a super tight sweater? And then inviting me out for a walk in the woods to teach me something about bird songs and writing. Oh sure, he’s just fascinated with my bod and hot to get into my pants. They’re all hypocrites, we know that. And we all know that young female undergrads are sweet and intelligent, and if they’re not we shouldn’t say so. What an uncool jerk, he thinks he can talk to birds. And his admiration for the books of this guy Sukenick, one of which they forced me to read in my American Lit course, and was completely incomprehensible. I can tell he thinks I’m stupid ó well, I think he’s stupid. I’ve got issues with him. He’s too skinny, and he needs a shave and looks poor and he talks like a nerd. Twenty-eight. I wonder what it would be like to screw an old guy like that? He’s obviously obsessed with sex. And he talks so much. Conversation is so aggressive and male. It’s like an invasion of my mental space, i.e., rape. That’s it, it’s a kind of verbal rape ó he knows what he’s doing. But what am I doing? I don’t want to criticize, that’s not cool. Why can’t we just hug and osmose? I know why, it’s because Waldo is just a mouthpiece for Sukenick, it’s so lame, like when he said Sukenick’s “Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues” is one of his best books and gave a list of the terminology of a whole new rhetoric of reality found in it. He told me to complain to my professors if I didn’t understand it. Later, in the chateau, I called him on this last remark, and he said it was ironic. Meaning you don’t say what you really mean. Like I found that real confusing and unAmerican ó real Americans say what they mean straight out, and sneaky talk like that is liable to penetrate my mental defenses, i.e., rape. Anyways, I met this woman in the chateau named Rose, she’s from the “Narralogue on Everything” and I’m from one called “Chat,” and I said to her that I thought novels were about action like movies, and she said novels weren’t movies but more like poems or paintings, and she said the action involved was thinking, which a friend of hers named Wally Stevens called an act of the mind, a violence within against a violence without, i.e., rape. I don’t really understand all this, but I guess I better read “Narralogues.” After all, I’m in it. Anyways, I learned in my writing workshop that the whole point is to stop thinking, to work like a carpenter following blueprints, to put things together like they’ve always been put together without questioning what that implies. I guess that’s the theory, though Rose says it’s an unexamined theory. And the chatelaine, what they call the mistress of the chateau, who seems to be a tough old bird herself, and who claims like Waldo to talk with Edgar Allen, the Crow, says a little bird told her that writing is like marriage, a combination of argument and love, chance and passion, seduction and heartbreak, not meant for the timid or the faint of heart. Anyways, what I wanted to say when Waldo left me standing in the forest path with my mouth open, is that I didn’t need to get lost, I am lost. And who is going to find me? If I can’t be part of the “Narralogues,” even as an ephebe, in its polylogue palaver about these issues.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/fiction">fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/narralogues">narralogues</a>, <a href="/tags/parody">parody</a>, <a href="/tags/irony">irony</a>, <a href="/tags/rape">rape</a>, <a href="/tags/post-feminist">post-feminist</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator801 at http://electronicbookreview.com